Quote

You can hike into the Yellowstone backcountry. You can camp in the Yellowstone backcountry. You can take food into the Yellowstone backcountry, and you're surrounded by grizzly bears. And it's - it's a very, very thrilling, peculiar situation. Every sound that you hear in the night, you wonder is this a grizzly bear coming to tear into my tent?

David Quammen

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David Quammen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: February 24
Journalist
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Situation
Peculiar
Hike
Sound
Bear
Tent
Night
Bears
Tents
Take
Tears
Thrilling
Every
Coming
Camp
Food
Tear
Grizzly
Hear
Surrounded
Grizzlies
Wonder
Camps
Yellowstone

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To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before.
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Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.
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Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.
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Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
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I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.
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Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.
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Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering facts. Besides expressing their condescension toward him in particular, that criticism also reflected a common attitude that fact-gathering, not theory, was the proper business of all naturalists.
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